Brand guidelines: a consistent visual identity across all your media

Your visual identity is the image your business presents to the world: its logo, colours, typefaces and the style of its photographs. The brand guidelines are the document that sets out the rules, ensuring that this image remains consistent everywhere — on your website, in your marketing materials, on social media, in your shop window — regardless of who is implementing it.

AmaZili’s graphic design studio can create your style guide, or revamp the one you already have, and provide you with ready-to-use templates.

Visual identity and graphic style guide: what’s the difference?

Visual identity is what the public sees. The graphic style guide is the set of guidelines that enables it to be reproduced faithfully. A company can have a visual identity without a style guide: it then becomes distorted over time as documents are produced, service providers change and the years go by — a colour that drifts, a stretched logo, a substitute font. The style guide is what protects it from this.

What a graphic style guide contains

• The logo and its variants — full colour, single colour, negative, reduced version —, its clearance area, its minimum size and uses to be avoided;
• colours, with their exact references for each use: four-colour process for print, RGB and hexadecimal for screen, Pantone where required;
• the typefaces for headings and body text, and their equivalents for the web and office software;
• the graphic elements that define your brand identity: shapes, patterns, pictograms;
• the style of images: photographs, illustrations, framing;
• standard layouts: letterhead, business cards, quotations, presentations, email signatures;
• digital applications: website, social media, newsletters;
• depending on your needs, signage: shop signs, vehicles, trade fairs.

How we develop your brand guidelines

1. Taking stock. We gather together what already exists — logo, documents, website, printed materials — and identify what works and what has become outdated.
2. Positioning. Your business, your clients, your tone: what your brand image needs to convey.
3. The design process. We start with your logo – or create or update it – then select colours, typefaces and graphic elements.
4. Testing the guidelines. Each guideline is tested on actual media, both printed and digital, before being finalised.
5. Delivery and support. We provide you with the style guide and its files, and we remain on hand to assist with the initial implementation.

What you receive

• The brand guidelines themselves, a clear document designed to be read by both your teams and your service providers;
• files containing your logo in all its variations, including vector files for print and image files for the web;
• ready-to-use templates: letterhead, business cards, email signatures, presentations and visuals for social media;
• colour and typeface specifications, to be passed on as they are to your printer or web agency.

A style guide designed for the digital world too

A digital brand identity goes further than a print-based one. It includes colours with sufficient contrast to ensure legibility for everyone, including those with visual impairments; a version of your brand identity for dark backgrounds and dark mode on screens; your website’s icon in the browser tab; and formats specific to each social media platform.

If we also build your website, your brand guidelines will directly form the basis of its design: colours, typefaces and components are carried over as they are, without any reinterpretation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a logo before creating a brand identity?

No. If you have a logo, we’ll use that as our starting point; if not, we’ll create both together, ensuring they’re consistent from the outset.

Does a small business need a brand identity?

Yes, on a suitable scale. A few pages are often enough: the logo, two or three colours, two typefaces and the most commonly used document templates. This prevents the brand image from becoming fragmented as the business grows.

Our brand identity has become outdated: do we need to start from scratch?

Rarely. A redesign retains what your customers recognise and modernises the rest. The new style guide then sets out the updated version.

Who can use our brand guidelines?

Anyone who produces materials for you: your teams, your printer, your web agency, your partners. That is precisely its purpose.

Our graphic design studio

Our graphic designers and artists create logos, brand guidelines, infographics and visuals, and process your images for all your media, both print and digital. We also manage your printing, from the digital file to the finished product, so that you can focus on what you do best: running your business.